I just started reading this fascinating book Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. I've made it through Part I, where Louv illustrates the dramatic changes that have happened to nature in America and how the youth of each passing generaton have adapted to our natural surroundings.
Louv makes the case that children today know a lot about the environment—acid rain, recycling, waste, deforestation, endangered species—but never experience it. Children do not interact with nature freely. Interaction with nature is now highly organized and monitored by adults. Children stay on the trail and within earshot of parents—they don't venture out into the woods on their own anymore.
This is causing a nature-deficit disorder in children. Louv does not consider this a medical diagnosis, but more of a common sense viewpoint. One of the most intriguing symptoms of nature-deficit disorder is that creativity dramatically drops in children who do not engage with the outdoors on a meaningful level.
Louv recounts an interview he had with a fifth grader who, unlike many of her peers, interacted with nature on a deep level. She told Louv that she wanted to be a poet when she grew up, and that she had a elemental connection with the woods:
I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I'd dug a big hole there, and sometimes I'd take a tent back there, or a blanket , and just lie down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometime I'd fall asleep back in there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day....And then they cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me. (14)
Louv noted that the fifth grader saw nature as representing beauty and refuge. Her connection with nature was what connected her to her poetry, her art. There is a long history of nature in American poetry, from Longfellow to Whitman to Frost to Berry and Kooser.
Longfellow captures the point of nature, that it is beauty and refuge, in his poem "My Lost Youth":
I can see the breezy dome of groves,
The shadows of Deering's woods;
And the friendships old and the early loves
Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves
In quiet neighbourhoods.
It is in this sentiment that nature becomes the tool of the artist: when nature becomes so near that the memories of nature and of friendship and love are intertwined. Nature is the palette with which artist create, whether a painter like J.M.W. Turner or those from the Hudson River School, poets like those listed above or writers like Annie Dilliard. In nature artists can find the color and phrasing and cadence with which to create just as our Creator made all of nature.
Thomas Turner is the Donor Relations Program Manager at International Justice Mission and the Senior Editor & Publisher of GENERATE Magazine.
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